Colm O'Regan: Can we Irish get used to the heat we've been basking in? I think so

Memory has a habit of condensing, occasional hot weather separated by years into one long memory of Golly Bars and Choc Ices. Picture: Colin Keegan/ Collins

We mightn’t make the third week of a heatwave but still, it feels like something has shifted in the national psyche that goes beyond the weather itself.

We are, whether we like it or not, becoming a different sort of country. A country getting used to heat.

You notice it in small things first. The casual planning of outdoor family gatherings more than an hour in advance.

There is less stupid sunburn. The particularly Irish sunburn, the kind that arrives after 20 minutes of “I’ll be grand. I did a 23andMe and apparently I’m 4% Middle Eastern”. Which results in the sunburn that turns a man into a walking rhubarb-and-custard sweet.

In its place: Tans. Actual tans. It’s still dead skin doing it’s natural UV-protection thing, but it does go better with a white shirt.

The houses have changed too. Every second house is now, to all intents and purposes, a small Spanish cantina. Blinds drawn at three in the afternoon — proper heat management, the kind of move you’d only ever have seen before on a holiday in Alicante, standing outside a shuttered shop convinced it was closed, only to peep inside and see a set of kindly grandfathers playing chess, drinking egg-cup sized coffees, and smoking.

Now it’s Phelim from number 12. The blinds are down like the house is running some class of penny stock operation inside, all to reduce solar gain.

People are realising the rake of space out the front is useless now. An Commisiún Pleanala won’t know what to do with all the retention planning permission for courtyards and cellars.

The cars have gone strange too. Windows down, in car parks, unlocked in some cases, in a manner that would have been considered an open invitation to the criminal classes as recently as June. They can’t take every car, surely. There has to be a limit.

There is talk of air conditioning, the bandying around of the phrase “AC”, all-American like we’re on a sidewalk about to pop the hood of the trunk of the car in Long Island.

We can’t be far now from footage of kids opening a fire hydrant in slow motion while a rapper raps about back in the day for a music video shot, inexplicably, on the North Ring Road.

Bouncy cars will follow. Wet scarves around necks. Reports of a man sleeping on a rooftop in Letterfrack. There’ll be movies made about the Summer of Mayo for Sam about a serial killer on the loose the week the power failed at the data centre and no one could post online.

And here is where it gets awkward. Can we say it, finally? Can we be absolutely minus craic and say the phrase climate change?

As soon as you open your mouth, someone will mention the summer of 1976. There are children who haven’t made their Communion yet reminiscing about 1976. And in fairness, it had two heatwaves — nine days in June, 14 in August.

But memory has a habit of condensing, occasional hot weather separated by years into one long memory of Golly Bars and Choc Ices.

I had a look through my late father’s diaries from 1983 onwards. And the summers, just like the Late Late Show under Gay Byrne, there were a lot of shite ones.

But while we’re doing memory, I got out of the air-conditioned car last Friday in Dripsey and it was the hottest I ever remembered. That’s about four decades of data.

But but but 1976! Forget the peaks. Look at the lack of troughs. Last summer was the warmest here ever because the nights were hot.

As parents shout at their children: “Close the door, you’re letting the heat in”, I think we’re ready for some data now.